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13-Way AMD Open Linux GPU Drivers On The Source Engine

11-12-2013, 04:06 PM

Phoronix: 13-Way AMD Open Linux GPU Drivers On The Source Engine

For your viewing pleasure today is a 13-way AMD Radeon graphics card comparison when testing out the open-source Radeon Gallium3D drivers on the wide spectrum of ATI/AMD GPUs while looking at the performance for Valve's Source Engine with Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. Given the imminent arrival of Steam Machines and SteamOS to push Linux gaming into its long-awaited spotlight, is AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver capable of delivering a reasonable level of performance?

The Radeon HD 7850, HD 7950, and R9 270X graphics cards on the RadeonSI driver failed to work four both TF2 and CS:S; it appeared due to GLSL issues.

That's quite strange. I am happily using radeonsi on those games (as well as other Source games such as L4D2 and Dota2) with a HD 7870, although it is true that I have my mesa recompiled with llvm-3.4 (which solves quite a bunch of bugs).

Comment

Depends on your distribution. On Slackware it is: Download the source, adapt the version number in the SlackBuild script, run it and install the generated package.
On other distributions you will do that different, for example on Debian or Ubuntu just do a web search for "how to backport" or something similar.

Comment

IIRC the shader count was doubled going from HD48xx to HD58xx so even though the 5830 is cut down pretty far it still has more shader ALUs (1120) than a fully configured 48xx (800).

You might be right, both cards have nearly same specification, RadeonHD 4890 with 850MHz shader clock and 975MHz memory clock vs RadeonHD 5830 with 800MHz shader and 1GHz memory clocks.
But I have observed in benchmarks using Catalyst drivers (both Linux and Windows) that 4890 is usually in par with 5870 and 6770. No idea about 7000 and newer.